notes to IntroductIon 179sconi 1998, 52). It was Hegel’s attempt, in fact, to prove that Africans had not yet
reached a capacity for fixed objectivity.
Bernasconi explains, “Hegel’s claim was not just that Africans lacked what
‘we’ call religion and the state, but also that one could not find among them a
conception of God, the eternal, right, nature, or even of natural things. In con-
sequence, Africans could be said to be in the condition of immediacy or uncon-
sciousness. This is the basis on which Hegel characterized them as dominated
by passion, savage, barbaric, and hence, most importantly for his discussion of
history, at the first level” (52– 53).
Such radically slanted declarations about “Africa,” employed by Hegel in his
choices to dramatize, selectively cite, and elide the cultural practices of Afri-
cans themselves, are what enable Bernasconi to declare that while Hegel may
not have directly developed colonial practices, “he certainly contributed to the
climate in which there was relatively little scrutiny of the conduct of Europeans
in Africa” (62). Indeed, Bernasconi argues, Hegel’s endorsement of African slav-
ery did not hinge on an argument of their natural inferiority but rather on the
fact that being subjected to slavery by European colonial powers would benefit
Africans by bringing them into the fold of world history.
1 3 Between the fall of 1804 and the end of 1805, the journal Minerva, founded by
the German publicist Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz, published a continuing
series about the Haitian revolution “totaling more than a hundred pages, in-
cluding source documents, news summaries, and eyewitness accounts, that in-
formed its readers not only of the final struggle for independence of this French
colony—under the banner Liberty or Death!—but of events over the past ten
years as well” (Buck- Morss 2000, 838). While Archenholz was critical of the
violence of the revolution, Buck- Morss argues that he came to appreciate the
leadership and vision of Toussaint Louverture, and that there is evidence that
Hegel was following this series. It is odd then that in Hegel scholarship “no one
has dared to suggest that the idea for the dialectic of lordship and bondage came
to Hegel in Jena in the years 1803– 5 from reading the press—journals and news-
papers” (Buck- Morss 2000, 843– 4 4).
1 4 See Chen’s Animacies (2012), which offers a new materialist account of the poli-
tics of objectification, dehumanization, and thingification through disability
studies and queer of color critique. The glq special issue “Queer Inhumanisms”
also makes this critical link between race and materiality through a series of
persuasive articles.
51 The modern human understands itself by way of its mastery. Even Heidegger
(1982) (via Friedrich Nietzsche) anticipated the moment in which the human
as master of the world would come to crisis when our innovative technologies
had advanced in ways we were not yet prepared to manage.
1 6 Radhakrishnan situates himself in opposition to scholars like Aijaz Ahmad,
who argues, for instance, in his critique of Edward Said that Said’s work is “self-
divided... between a host of irreconcilable positions in cultural theory” (1992,